BigFix Reviews

I find the lifecycle and compliance models to be the most valuable features.

BigFix should consider giving organizations in Turkey a lower price.

I have been using BigFix for nearly a year. 

BigFix is a stable solution. We have not had any issues with it. 

BigFix is scalable and reliable. It has been good for our organization. 

We have not had much use for technical support. The few times that we did get in touch with them, they solved our problems. However, we have not had much need for technical support. BigFix is easy to use.

The initial setup was not complex.

BigFix is actually a little bit on the expensive side in Turkey because of the dollar's exchange rate in our currency. 

Everyone should give in Turkey a try. Our services are easy to manage with BigFix. It is a quick and easy-to-use tool. 

I like the inventory and life cycle management feature. It's simple to use. This platform is easier than Azure.

The remote software installation could be better. I would also like to see mobile device management within the BigFix itself. I would also like to have GlobalProtect management.

I have been using BigFix for approximately three years.

BigFix is a stable solution. You can deploy it and forget about it. 

BigFix is easy to scale. 

Technical support is very good.

The initial setup is straightforward and took us a day to implement.

I would recommend BigFix to new users.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give BigFix a seven.

BigFix is a good product with good technical support. We are updating the package and everything, so there are no issues.

BixFix is good, but they have to update the product. For example, we need AI, ML, and IIT. We also want to edit the discovery of our assets less.

There are some status problems we can't really call a bug. We want them to improve and offer these things. I want a Manager of Manager. I also want to see the multiple control and a multiple report format. I want to get the whole report within a single console.

It's like you have a simple car and you want to buy a BMW. A simple car also works, and every car has four wheels. But we all want more power, to be more agile, and receive more status updates.

I have been using BigFix for six years.

The stability of BigFix isn't bad.

The scalability of BigFix isn't bad.

BigFix technical support is good.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give BigFix a seven.

Our primary use case is Patch Management.

This has very much improved our organization by saving time to deploy thousands of endpoints to our customers.

The most valuable feature is Patch Management.

We would like to see a different license plan, e.g. to include features from lifecycle with Patch Management, as an example.

We have been using BigFix for five years.

I support multiple customers who use BixFix for many uses including for security compliance, server automation, remote control, software distribution, patching, etc. 

One of the biggest benefits BigFix has had for our organization is the ease and efficiency to perform many different tasks, across pillars and platforms, all from one pane of glass.

It has immensely reduced network traffic when it comes to downloading patches. Across the board, I've had a number of customers who've had platform tools that I'm able to combine into one tool.

We've set up and started using BigFix to patch and have had much higher patch saturation rates than in the past. We do historical tracking with BigFix, and we can see that the success rate's gone way up.

It has also helped to reduce help desk calls because of the success rate that we have with the patching. As the success rate goes up, we get fewer calls. 

The power is all in the platform. It's great to be able to patch. It's great to have a bunch of stuff for security compliance, etc but the power truly is in the platform or the tool.

I would like to see SDK for Web UI included in the next release. 

Overall it's a very stable solution.

I've worked with customers that have a couple thousand endpoints to a couple hundred thousand endpoints. I've also looked at other competing technologies out there, and it is definitely one of the leading tools on the marketplace in terms of the scalability performance.

The initial setup is very straight forward. Depending on the customer, it can be complex as far as doing the necessary planning. Some customers can miss the point of doing a lot of that planning up front. If done right, it's not complex at all. You get really fast ROI from the tool.

My customers definitely do see ROI from using BigFix but it varies from customer to customer. 

BigFix has faster ROI than SCCM. It's more scalable, requires a lot less hardware, has faster reporting, quicker data to get out of it; it's better.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. Not a ten because there's always room for improvement. I've been working with tools like BigFix for quite a while and it's one of the best tools on the market.

I primarily consult with other companies for their software asset management purposes. I use BigFix to help deploy the IBM license metric tool and BigFix inventory.

The older version of the tools that I use also included the connectivity aspect, and the fact that the tool now has it separate from the collection of usage data makes the deployment of these tools much easier.

The fact that it works with endpoints so well is the most valuable feature. A big part of the collection of IBM License Metric Tool data is from the endpoint so it really helps.

Even at a very large number of endpoints, it's very stable.

Their technical support is very good. The PMRs I have had to open with IBM are answered pretty well. I have nothing but praise for these people.

I self-taught for this online, so the initial setup was a little difficult to pick up at first. I had to create a couple of testing environments and destroy them in order to learn how to use it. There was a lot of trial and error, a lot of reading of the manuals. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. I'd give it an eleven but it's off the scale. It does what it says it's supposed to do. Once you get over the learning curve, it is pretty easy to use. Plugging in the endpoints is pretty simple.

I would advise someone considering this solution to hands down use it. 

We use this solution to successfully manage and control approximately thirty-five hundred machines in multiple, complex environments.

1. I can manage all of my assets from one place, no matter where they are in the world.
2. Manage deployments and authorized software assets.
3. Manage IMAGES for the entire organization from one place, and do it fast!
   
4. Patch management is no longer a problem.

The most valuable feature is patch management, a must have, even for Linux and iOS.

We have a strict standard for compliance, and this solution has simplified this. 

I would like to see the Self Service section made more user-friendly.

With respect to OSD, I would like to control the task sequence competently from the BigFix console.

My primary use case of this solution is for information security-related functions, like patching and threat detection.

BigFix has enabled us to have a highly successful endpoint patching program for the past decade. It's been enormously successful there. It's also become a core part of many of our business processes, from compliance monitoring of endpoints, encryption management, key escrow, and local administrator password escrow. It's built into our inventory. It's very much everywhere.

We do use BigFix as a system of investigation in the instance of lost and stolen devices to get an idea of what sort of data was possibly on it. It is an integral part of our compliance management system. Using BigFix to report on our encryption stance has been extraordinarily impactful in terms of avoiding fines for HIPAA violations and in terms of lost and stolen devices. We're definitely talking millions of dollars per year. We've got two hospitals, and probably lose a laptop a day. The scale is such that it's a huge number of machines wandering off. Now that we have good encryption coverage and good reporting on that coverage, in a lot of instances, we can acknowledge and verify that the device was lost but that it was verifiably encrypted, there were no records released, and we can then close an investigation. That's huge.

The custom content flexibility is the most important feature. Its ubiquity is also valuable. We've got very good adoption and it helps that it's one of the few tools that we have everywhere.

Network traffic is one of our current pain points. BigFix's high performance and high availability in our environment easily overwhelms our high-performance firewalls. Every time we push out patches to our entire population, it makes the firewalls very unhappy for about an hour and slows down some of our core enterprise apps. We're working to identify ways to fix that. We think that BigFix provides mechanisms for spreading out that load over time. We're going to be deploying that soon which will hopefully take care of the problem. Bandwidth is never a problem for us, we have enormous bandwidth. The number of sessions gets overwhelming when you have tens of thousands of machines all getting patched simultaneously. We're just going to spread that out over time and BigFix does offer that capability.

Around the scalability concern, I would like to see the ability to run teamed, clustered, or hierarchical root servers in order to provide a more robust, high availability system. The single monolithic root server model does somewhat bother me.

Until our most recent information security system that we stood up, which is unrelated to BigFix, BigFix was our most solid system, in terms of how much engineering effort it requires to keep up and running, relative to the number of servers involved. It's a pretty solid system. We do run into bugs and interesting functional quirks, usually around how the endpoint agent reports into the relays. It mostly just takes care of itself, for the most part. We do have to do a little care and feeding, but it's mostly self-sufficient.

We manage about 75,000 systems, most of them in a single instance and we have not run into serious performance issues at that scale. I have some concerns around the root server and the number of relays checking into it. We may be running into some performance issues there, but they're not impacting the functionality at this time.

Technical support has gone through its ups and downs, especially under IBM. The IBM support mechanism is clunky and somewhat challenging. They have made improvements recently. One thing that I really value about this organization is that we have a dedicated customer advocate, who is on the development team, and who is able to escalate serious issues as necessary, when the standard channels aren't working well. They've maintained that personal touch that has really improved our confidence in the support.

SCCM is not particularly effective as a cross-platform solution, so that alone makes it less of a contender. Also, BigFix is a lot more flexible, in terms of the types of content you can deploy, the types of reporting you can do, and the types of customizations you can do. We used to do a lot with the integration of the data from BigFix into many other systems, and so the customization is critical and SCCM doesn't offer anything like that.

I would rate it a solid eight out of ten. It's definitely not better than that, because it has a lot of Legacy code, a lot of early design decisions that it's still limping along with. On the other hand, I haven't found anything better out there. There are other competing products in this space, but nothing has convinced me that there is any compelling reason to switch. A lot of the value that we've gotten comes from the people that we're involved with, and the relationships that we've built with the community and vendor over time. I haven't found something that has a better security design. I'm a security guy, and a lot of the decisions that were made very early on in the BigFix product translate to enforcing good security practice, which I have not seen in other vendor solutions.

I would advise organizations looking at BigFix to not try to do everything all at once, but to get one process in place really solidly, and then move on to the next, all the while working on increasing coverage, and getting it on all of the systems. Both of those things take a long time. Don't try to build everything all simultaneously, because you will fail and it will probably take several iterations to get it right so make sure to take a very measured approach.